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Of all the false dawns of the third party as an independent force in British politics, none is more resonant than the Glasgow Hillhead by-election in March 1982. Ever since the end of the Great War, Glasgow Hillhead had been a Conservative seat. In 1982, Roy Jenkins, back from a stint in Brussels to lead the charge to what he had called, in his 1979 Dimbleby Lecture, “the radical centre”, won Glasgow Hillhead for the newly formed Social Democratic Party.

The successor to the SDP, the Liberal Democrat party that was the upshot of the merger with the Liberals, meets